Output technologies for digital photography

An explosion of interest in digital photography has occurred in the past few years. Numerous new products have become available, each representing a price or quality breakthrough, or both. Examples include film scanners from Nikon, Polaroid and Kodak, digital cameras from over a dozen manufacturers, task-oriented imaging software applications from Microsoft, Live Picture and Adobe, services such as film scanning becoming available over the Web, and photo-quality printers from HP, Epson, Fuji, Kodak and Canon. While "digital photography" as a concept is readily grasped, just under the surface lie a number of challenging systems problems in two worlds that do not normally communicate with each other: photography and digital systems design. We outline some key issues from each of these worlds and, in addition, describe some recent advances in thermal ink-jet technology which enable photo-quality printing. Understanding these issues is key to routinely obtaining quality output from a digital photography system.